MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Here’s one of the things I love about working with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CMO, MECLABS – he routinely looks at the most vexing marketing challenges and creates an entirely new paradigm; a new lens through which to approach these challenges.

Take the marketing funnel for example. Flint says that the traditional view of the sales and marketing funnel is, essentially, upside down. Literally.

In fact, you should take the traditional funnel and flip it. Prospects aren’t just falling into this wide net, waiting for someone to sell to them. Rather, you must keep pushing them up through the funnel, against the constant tug of gravity, which slows down and often stops your sales process. The force that pushes them up through that funnel and overcomes all the forces that can easily stop that sales is a powerful value proposition.

Flint spoke extensively about value proposition at MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in Boston, and I grabbed him just after the Summit ended to ask a few questions about value prop for B2B marketers: Read more…

On Monday, we showed you two landing pages and asked you to vote for which one received the highest conversion rate in a split test. The actual test was done by Michael Aagaard, and there was a very clear winner.

In today’s post, I’m going to talk about how Michael got his results. First, the test …

Background

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, this test was for a free trial of a forex trading platform from Denmark’s Saxo Bank. After trying a few different strategies with their page, nothing worked to improve conversion on their PPC landing page for the trial. They had essentially hit a wall with their page. Unfortunately, the money they were making from the product was looking fairly bleak compared to the amount they were spending on PPC.

So when Michael Aagaard offered them a landing page audit through his consulting site, Saxo Bank was willing to give him a try. Read more…

Upon the completion of the recent MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, we learned that because of an ever more challenging environment, B2B marketers are beginning to embrace sales conversion as a Sales and Marketing responsibility, and not just Sales alone.

We are on the right track. The challenge is that marketers are having trouble gaining funnel optimization maturity.

Chart: B2B marketers show high levels of maturity at top of the funnel, not at the bottom

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B2B marketers are the most likely to have formal processes established for lead generation, and the least likely to have them for overall funnel optimization. Now is the time for marketers to capitalize on this trend, and really get ahead of the curve to establish their companies and themselves as industry leaders and champion over the competition.

So how can marketers gain maturity in funnel optimization? As a highly complex process, it is likely the reason for marketer’s struggle. Starting with some funnel optimization is going to be more effective than paying no regard to it. In this interest, we have identified a simplified, five-step process to getting started with funnel optimization. Read more…

Toward the end of last year, Active Network, a technology and media company specializing in online registration and event management software, began a testing and optimization program on the website of one of its brands, RegOnline.

This week’s MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter article is a look at that entire program, but for this blog post I want to highlight an interesting test conducted in the middle of the cycle. This particular test deserves a closer look because it created impressive results, but more importantly, it illustrates why it is important to be flexible with a testing program.

At the beginning of Active Network’s testing cycle, the tests were conducted on the RegOnline homepage. The problem was that tested treatments were not producing positive results — and the homepage accounts for about 90% of RegOnline’s revenue.

Essentially, with the treatments being outperformed by the control, the homepage tests were hurting RegOnline’s bottom line.

This caused concern and discouragement with both the testing team and top-level management at Active Network.

A decision was made to begin testing other channels, such as landing pages, PPC ad copy and email messaging, to hopefully find some learnings that could inform future homepage tests. Another benefit was because these other channels had a more singular purpose than the homepage, it was easier to design a test to get a “win” and ease some of the discouragement.

Lauren Guinn, Director Online Marketing, Active Network, explains, “Because there is so much business risk testing on our homepage, we shifted to smaller tests on other channels and then applied these learnings to big tests on our homepage.” Read more…

Nothing can be assumed when you’re sending an email. You cannot assume recipients know where to click. You cannot assume they realize that the landing page and the email are connected. When you make these assumptions, you’re really hoping the audience will “figure it out.”

But your audience does not want to “figure it out.” Sure, some of them will get it. But others will not realize your image is hyperlinked. Or they will not realize they are on the right landing page, and will leave instead. To avoid this, eliminate what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, calls “unsupervised thinking.”

This phrase came to mind repeatedly during the Actionable Design Insights session at ExactTarget Connections 2011. After teaching our Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop earlier in the week at Connections, I sat in the audience on Wednesday to hear best practice advice from Kristina Huffman, Sr. Design Consultant at ExactTarget, and real marketing examples from Laura Schraeder, Email Marketing Specialist at Helzberg Diamonds.

Below are just a few of the many takeaways on email design highlighted during the session: Read more…

Imagine for a second that you’re running a banner ad campaign on a website with a black background. Now, if you were going to choose a color for that banner to get more clicks, would you choose a dark shade of blue or bright yellow?

If you’re like me, you would have guessed yellow. Unfortunately for our marketing intuition, a recent test we ran with a Research Partner proves otherwise.

For this test, we ran two different versions of a banner offering a large financial institution’s branded version of a credit card, alongside a $50 gift card incentive. Essentially, if the visitor applied for the branded credit card (the same brand as the site on which the banner ad appeared), they could get a $50 gift card after making qualifying purchases. The test itself was an A/B sequential test. Read more…